


Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)

by Delphi



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1930s, M/M, Music, Speakeasies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:27:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22603936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: A guy could be doing worse for himself these days. Benny Zalman makes his living behind the bar of the Bearcat Club, pouring sugar on bathtub gin and busting heads when the room gets rowdy. One night is pretty much like the next—until the club hires a new piano player who unexpectedly sets Benny’s heart swinging.
Relationships: Speakeasy Bartender/Speakeasy Piano Player
Comments: 46
Kudos: 107
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CelestialArcadia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CelestialArcadia/gifts).



> I offer a track list for the songs that are played in this story, and also my apologies for all of the terrible music puns.
> 
> [On the Sunny Side of the Street](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AAUwHEBIFk)  
> [Exactly Like You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAYZH-6xsPk)  
> [I Got Rhythm](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPRiM5JvYx8)  
> [Stagger Lee](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CfmZ1-CQbo)  
> [My Doctor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnv0jzzgFjE)  
> [Ain't Misbehavin'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTUxw6ioyJU)  
> [Blue Skies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7cPcEa4e8I)  
> [Sleepy Time Gal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEktZ_6gpyk)  
> [Someone to Watch Over Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xMOTagzx78)  
> [Yosel, Yosel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_NKPgJywkg)  
> [Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ka61YBmOD0)  
> [Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0ukHTRPpQ8)

“Nicest guy I ever met in a dark alley,” Abe would later tell it, and who was Benny to argue with a compliment like that?

The Bearcat Club had lost its last piano player two weeks prior, after Benny caught the guy banging out a rendition of “You Were Meant for Me” on the cash register keys and had to break all his fingers. Bad luck for the piano player, but worse luck for the speako, which otherwise only had a beat-up Edison with a case of the hiccups and a stack of second-hand records that no one cried over taking to the hock shop. 

Back in those days, the club wasn’t the kind of place that could get by on ambience. It was a ten-table joint in the damp cellar of an automat, with a hush-hush entrance through the kitchen upstairs and an even more hush-hush emergency exit through a bookshop around the corner. A pool table and a private poker room were its only real attractions, and on a good night it was packed with thirty or forty upstanding citizens who couldn’t afford to drink somewhere more fashionable. The hat check girl occasionally tried to convince people that the guy who’d played the detective in _The Cocoanuts_ drank there, but even that was pushing it. The crowd at the Bearcat mostly lived in the neighborhood, got sick of looking at each other all day, and turned the wrong kind of rowdy when they had to hear each other talk. 

Throw in the swampy weather of late July and a week’s worth of dust on the piano, and no wonder there was a fight. 

“I swear to God, you dumb son of a bitch—”

It broke out at a corner table, and both God and Benny missed whatever was going to come next on account of the would-be prophet taking a shaker pint to the skull. _Crack_ went the glass as it bounced to the floor. Down went the prophet. Little Millie let out a shriek, but she had only been waiting tables here a month, so you could forgive her. Dot, who had been here since opening night, stole a lit cigarette from the slack hand of a gawking customer and headed upstairs for a smoke break.

Benny gave it a few seconds to see if the matter had resolved itself, but the prophet rose from the dead and came up swinging. His fist connected with the pitcher’s jaw, and off they went. The drum section started up, feet stomping and fists pounding all around the place at the prospect of a show.

“Knock it off, you animals!” one of the regulars hollered, but his reedy voice didn’t make a dent in the din.

The sight of Benny stepping out from behind the bar had a more impressive effect.

Benny was what the boss liked to call a problem solver. On the grand scale of things—which in Benny’s world ran through how much you got paid and how rarely you had to replace your shirts—being a problem solver was a step up from being an enforcer but got you less money and more bloodstains than being a fixer. At twenty-two, it was settled that no one would ever accuse him of being a great thinker or a leader of men, but his promotion from driving trucks to tending bar had been offered on the grounds that he could make change from a dollar, eyeball an ounce, and sort out misunderstandings.

In this case, he made his way over to the corner and addressed the misunderstanding with a kick, a yank, and a headlock. The prophet was smart enough to stay down this time, sitting on the floor with a bleeding goose egg over his right eye and an expression of acute embarrassment. The pitcher continued to kick up a fuss, and Benny grunted but didn’t flinch as he absorbed an elbow to the stomach.

“This the guy that tossed the glass?” he asked the prophet.

The prophet nodded.

Benny wasn’t inclined to listen to the sort of low-life who would throw an elbow, so he ignored the yelp of denial from the pitcher and tightened the headlock. He looked to a nearby blonde who had enough interest in the situation to be digging a hanky out of her handbag to press to the prophet’s forehead. He caught her eye.

“He have it coming to him?”

“No!” the prophet protested at the same time as the blonde said, “Kind of.”

Benny nodded. “Fine. You give my friend Millie there a buck for restocking.”

The prophet seemed to think better of arguing. Given that the blonde was now kneeling down beside him and stroking his hair, he was getting the better end of this deal.

“Urk!” said the pitcher as Benny hauled him out of the bar and up the stairs.

Floyd was on password duty, sitting in the dimly lit automat kitchen reading a Tijuana bible. Upon seeing Benny coming, he crammed the comic into his shirt pocket and got up to open the door. Benny grabbed the pitcher by the back of his belt, lifting him off his feet for the last few steps, then swung him back and heaved him out into the alley.

The pitcher hit the ground and rolled like a sack of potatoes, if a sack of potatoes knew how to curse a blue streak.

“Like I was telling you,” a familiar voice chirped from up the alley, “we run a respectable joint here.”

The pitcher had stopped rolling just short of some high-heeled shoes that probably cost a working man’s weekly wages. They were attached to a pair of gams he’d know anywhere, which stepped over the unfortunate bum like he was a puddle. Louise Sherman—Lulu if she liked you—was a dame who knew how to hit her mark, even if it was only the best light a Coleman lantern in an empty kitchen could muster.

“The ox is Floyd, and the bigger ox is Benny. They keep out the riffraff.”

Lulu gave him a quick kiss on the cheek as she stepped inside. Benny wished she’d quit doing that before someone decided he was making a play for the boss’s girl. The man following behind her was a stranger, but he tipped his hat to the prone pitcher with an unruffled politeness that said this wasn’t his first rodeo.

He was older than Benny, but just a little guy, maybe five-foot-six and built like a good subway draft might knock him over. His suit was sharp but not showy, and so was the trilby he took off as his foot swung over the threshold. He had the kind of face you wouldn’t have any trouble picking out of a lineup, and Benny couldn’t immediately decide what he thought of it. Big dark eyes and a crooked mouth fought for real estate with a beak of a nose, and whatever pomade he used was earning its dime keeping all that wavy hair in line.

“Abe Hirsch,” the little guy said, sticking out his hand. His voice had a surprising amount of gravel in it, and his accent was local.

“Benny Zalman.” The handshake was easier to judge than the face. Nice hand, firm grip.

“Make sure Benny comps you two drinks a night,” Lulu called over her shoulder as she swanned off into the club.

Benny looked the guy over skeptically. “What am I doing that for?”

The guy looked him over right back, but whatever he made of him, that face kept it under wraps. “I play piano.”

“Well, thank fuck for that,” was all Benny could say.

He left Floyd alone with Olive Oyl and Popeye and went back downstairs, where he introduced the new guy to the upright. Belatedly, he wished he’d cleaned it sometime in the last week, or at least wiped off the condensation rings on the top while they were still fresh. Hirsch didn’t say anything about it, just took off his jacket, dusted off the keys with his handkerchief like it was all part of the job, then sat down and started playing.

Benny made it two steps back to the bar before stopping in his tracks. He turned around, his head tilted to one side, and stupidly checked to make sure that was the same piano. He’d once boarded with a vaudeville hack who could swap an egg for a rabbit behind a wave of his handkerchief, and while he sincerely doubted the boss would bankroll a stunt this big, having some magician turn their clunky sawhorse into a baby grand was exactly the kind of idea Lulu would come up with.

No dice—or no smoke and mirrors. It was still the old beer-stained Stuyvesant, and still the old off-color keys that the last guy had hammered the same half-dozen ditties on like you had to strong-arm the thing just to get any sound out of it. Benny had always looked at the scarred wood and the bullet hole through one of the legs and figured that was just what a cheap piano sounded like when it hung around a joint like this too long.

The new guy’s fingers were hardly touching the keys, just rippling over them. Benny didn’t recognize the song, but from the way the tune kind of shimmied, slinking around the room and setting feet to tapping, he had a feeling it was being played exactly the way it was supposed to.

“Isn’t he good?” Lulu asked from her perch on the bar stool.

He realized he was staring at the guy and snapped out of it. He shook his head and stepped back behind the bar. “Not bad. He on loan or permanent?”

Lulu smiled and wiggled in her seat in a way that caught the eye of half the guys in here. With permission from the boss to run this place however she wanted, she seemed convinced she was going to turn the Bearcat into the talk of the town with nothing but gumption and enough pretty lamps. “We’ve got him every night except Friday.”

Benny found his gaze slipping back to the piano and the hands that were now skipping like stones on a river as the song started to really swing. “What is he, religious or something?”

Apparently not, given the case of the giggles that almost struck down Lulu in her prime. She leaned forward, biting her lip to pull herself together, and confided with glee: “He plays at the _Toulouse_ on Fridays.”

It took him a second to place the name, wondering what could be so funny about—

“Wait. The pansy place?”

“Isn’t that an absolute scream? Jakey took me last week.” She peered at him and then smacked him on the arm. “Get some sophistication why don’t you?”

Benny couldn’t say exactly what kind of look had crossed his face, but he plugged it twice and threw it in a hole anyway, replacing it with a know-nothing shrug. “Aw, I don’t get paid enough to get sophisticated.”

“Do you get paid enough to dance with me?”

“How much is a casket running these days?”

She pouted. “Wise guy. I know you get paid enough to fix me a drink. Do you know how to make El Presidentes? Everyone was having them at the Cotton Club last night. Jakey took me.”

“Sure,” he said. “Gin, soda, orange juice, and a twist of lime.”

“Not even close.”

“Yeah, but it’s what we got.” He dodged her second smack and reached for the gin, making sure the regulars in front could see him mixing. Everyone always wanted to be drinking whatever Lulu was, and he needed to move those limes before they went brown. 

The song the new guy was playing didn’t seem to end, but somewhere along the line it turned into the hopping start of “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Lulu was probably going to have to wait for the boss’s car to come around before she got to kick up her heels somewhere with a ballroom, but in the meantime a few tables were getting pushed back against the walls to make room as couples got up to dance. The music rose up to hold its own against the tap and shuffle of soles, the amateur choir, and the hubbub of everyone else trying to talk over the singing. 

A line started forming at the bar, orders coming in hot and fast for El Presidentes instead of plain old gin and juice, and just like that the night was suddenly looking up.

* * *

“ _Why should we spend money on a show or two?_ ” Millie sang out, doing a solo rumba along the sidewalk before making a face when her feet evidently reminded her she’d been on them all night. 

Benny, for his part, straightened up and glared at a couple of mooks on a nearby stoop who looked ready to offer up a midnight snack. He was clairvoyant that way, which was why he always walked the waitresses and the hat check girl home if they didn’t have someone else coming to pick them up. 

“Give us some baritone, Benny,” Millie pleaded, taking his arm.

“Benny’s big enough for bass,” Dot said, bumming a cigarette off Ethel.

He shook his head. 

“Is he shy or just a grump?” Millie asked.

“I’m tone deaf,” he said before Doctor Dot could give her diagnosis. 

“ _No one does those love scenes exactly like you_ ,” Ethel joined in, an alto to Millie’s soprano and always a sport.

Benny bore up stoically under the dirty looks they got from respectable folks who were heading off to an early shift for an honest day’s work. The girls weren’t bad singers, and there were worse sounds to wake up to. Worse weather too. The humidity had let up sometime in the middle of the night, and the sheen of hot sweat that coated everything had cooled down to something that might have been dew in a greener part of town. 

“ _You make me feel so grand, yes—_ ”

“ _—I want to hand the world to you!_ ”

That piano player had better brace himself, Benny thought. The girls were probably going gaga over him. Sure, he wasn’t so tall, but Benny had a good view of his back all night, and he was built just fine. Decent shoulders. Good hands. Nice head of hair, and the ladies liked a good head of hair. 

And playing music like that? 

Hell, even Benny was walking lighter, and he was no romantic. He liked taking girls out as much as the next red-blooded man, but he hadn’t really minded losing his regular Saturday dates when he'd switched to working nights. Life wasn’t like it was in the songs. No guy really stood on the corner gazing longingly up at some dame’s window all night or burned with a fever at the mere thought of kissing her. The sidewalks and the hospitals would be a lot more crowded, for one thing. 

The way he saw it, he’d be sorry to leave a looker like Ethel on her doorstep if guys really felt the kind of things they sang about girls. Instead, he said goodnight with nothing but the everyday satisfaction of seeing her home safe to her mother’s. If vamping really made a guy weak in the knees, he’d be climbing up through the window of Millie’s rooming house instead of hanging around just long enough to make sure she wasn’t locked out. Pent up as he was with nowhere to put it, he’d be taking up Dot’s nightly offer to come in for coffee again and put it wherever he wanted. 

“Tone deaf,” Dot said, shaking her head as she went inside without him.

He shrugged a “what are you going to do” kind of shrug and set off alone down Stanton Street. The noose of his tie had already been pulled open by the time he'd left the club, but now he took the thing off entirely and crammed it in his pocket. He loosened his collar and scratched the back of his neck, feeling like his skin was a size too small. One of these days, he thought, he was going to give up and ask Floyd where he got his reading material. 

In the meantime, he kicked a rock down the street ahead of him as he ambled past dark apartments and the first lights of the early bird businesses. He wet his lips and started to whistle. 

_I know why I’ve waited, know why I’ve been blue..._

Sure, it wasn’t how things were, but the song was catchy all the same.

* * *

The thing about little guys was that sometimes they would surprise you.

Benny had quit school after the sixth grade, but he knew about people and he had broken up enough brawls to know that grit didn’t work to scale. You might think that a guy who spent his Fridays playing piano at a pansy club wouldn’t be able to survive a place like the Bearcat, but if you thought about it for two seconds longer, you would realize that any featherweight who let it be known that he palled around with queers would have to be tough. 

It did not occur to Benny that Abe Hirsch might be a queer himself. Or rather, it did occur to him, but he thought about it for less than two seconds before tossing the idea. Obviously a guy like that was a real lady-killer. 

Abe took some razzing his first couple of weeks on the job, which was fair enough. Razzing was pretty much the free lunch at the Bearcat, and it only got worse when guys who wanted to be the life of the party had to share the floor with someone who was actually worth listening to. Abe didn’t bellyache about it. He didn’t even blink. He handled himself like a pro, ignoring every wolf’s request for “Ten Cents a Dance” and dodging the occasional thrown coaster when someone thought it was too early for “Georgia on My Mind.” 

Benny saw it all from his post every night. Between pouring and cleaning up, what else was there to do but lean on the bar top and listen? There wasn’t anything funny about liking to watch the guy play, he told himself. No one would call you funny for liking to watch Babe Ruth swinging for the outfield or Buster Keaton diving off a moving train, would they? Besides, after what had happened with the club’s last piano player, he figured it was his responsibility to keep an eye on those hands. 

If the Bearcat Club actually had a manager, it probably would have been Dot, but Benny was loyal enough to the boss to shoulder some oversight. Someone had to make sure the new guy was working out, right? He paid attention to him with this in mind, making like he was checking off a box in his head when Abe calmed down a rambunctious room with a nice slow number, or when the night ended with the kind of song that made all the customers want to pair off and stagger towards home, or at least into the nearest blind alley. He noticed the way that Abe would subtly speed up or slow down to match a customer's shaky singing, and the way he would play a little louder to cover up a wild pitch of a note, sometimes even changing up the music to close the song off right without embarrassing the would-be Ethel or Ruth. He liked the way Abe sat at the piano, swaying a little and sometimes bopping his head as everyone around him fell under his spell, holding the whole room’s attention the way Benny only did when he was about to toss someone out. 

Which was what went down on the Saturday night when Benny finally got tired of having to watch Abe prove he was tough. 

Some bum who had come in with a date that wasn’t sitting with him anymore had started tossing peanuts into the beer mug that served as a tip jar on top of the piano. Benny let it slide the first couple of times, because you couldn’t sell people hooch and not expect them to get a little stupid. It soon became clear, however, that the bum’s level of stupid was getting poured by the pint and not by the shot. His fifth throw went wide, and the peanut nailed Abe on the shoulder.

Abe kept on barreling through “I Got Rhythm” without skipping a beat.

The bum didn’t quit. The next time, he aimed at Abe instead of the jar, and then again, with the kind of dogged escalation that said he wasn’t going to stop until he got a reaction. 

Benny slapped his towel down on the bar and crossed the room to give him one. Some of the smarter regulars edged forward their chairs in anticipation of a show. Some of the better dressed ones edged back out of splatter range. The bum had just enough smarts left at the bottom of his glass to pause with the next peanut in his hand when he saw Benny coming.

Abe glanced up at him, and Benny had to fight to keep the hard-nosed look on his face at the sight of those hands still dancing across the bridge despite the interruption. His eyes, Benny realized, were so dark that even close up, it was hard to tell where the pupil ended and the color started. 

“How much you got in there?” Benny asked, nodding at the tip jar.

“A buck and a half, give or take a nickel.”

“I’ll cash it out at the register.”

The corner of Abe’s mouth lifted just a little as he nailed the chorus. “And why are we doing that?”

Benny picked up the tip jar. “Because our pal here’s gonna drink this.”

Funnily enough, despite having been ordering doubles at a good clip, the bum suddenly wasn’t thirsty anymore. Since he’d be wasting his time sticking around here when he wasn’t in the mood to drink, Benny helpfully showed him out. The speako was soundproofed like a tomb, but just before the stairway door closed behind him, he heard “I Got Rhythm” give way to the opening chords of “Stagger Lee," which made half the place bust up laughing.

Benny's ears had mostly stopped burning by the time he came back down, or at least they had until Abe caught his eye upon his return and threw him a wink.

He had finally made up his mind about the guy’s face. It was a good one. He had a soulful kind of look about him that made you want to treat him nice—if you were a dame, of course. A way of smiling just a little that made you want to get him alone and find out what he was thinking. He probably had all the girls here eating out of the palm of his hand. 

“What’s good tonight?” Abe asked him later that night, coming up to the bar on his break.

He didn’t often take advantage of his complementary drinks, usually going upstairs for what Benny assumed was some fresh air or a smoke. Benny couldn’t blame him. Their hooch hadn’t been the greatest the last couple of months, and a musician probably had a line in to better sources. 

“Uh,” he said, trying to remember the cocktail menu that Lulu had rattled off when she was in here with fabric swatches yesterday. “Mary Pickfords?”

Abe’s eyebrows shot up. “We’ve got rum?”

Benny immediately regretted pulling the special on someone whose circles overlapped more with Lulu’s than his own. 

“Gin,” he admitted and then made a face at the thought of this most recent batch. “Ish.”

“Pineapple juice?” Abe asked.

“Sugar.”

“Grenadine?”

“Look, I’m gonna level with you. I got ten crates of strawberry soda that fell off a truck, and I’ll hear about it from the boss if I don’t unload it.”

There was that kind-of smile again. “Anyone ever tell you you’re a funny guy?” 

Aware that he was on the edge of staring at that mouth a second too long, Benny looked up sharply and narrowed his eyes. “Not twice.”

Dot swished out of the poker room, pausing only to tuck a tip into her garter, and interrupted whatever Abe’s lips were parting to say next. 

“What overpriced hooey are we hawking tonight? The rowdies in there are throwing good money after bad.”

‘Gin and juice,’ Benny was about to say, but Abe was ahead of him.

“Bouncers.”

Dot raised an eyebrow and gave Abe a look that lesser men had wilted under.

Abe didn’t twitch. “Latest thing at the Stork Club.”

“Fine,” Dot said. “Get six on the tray, and I’ll pick them up after my smoke break.”

Benny watched her go, then laid out the glasses and shot Abe a sideways look. “Bouncers?”

“Sure. They pack a punch, but they’re sweeter than they look.”

He felt his face go red as strawberry soda and tried to hide it by ducking down behind the counter to get a bottle. 

“You, uh, you go to the Stork Club much?” he asked, pouring out what was more or less gin.

Abe leaned back against the bar, looking out at the room. “Now and then, when I’ve got a night off. I’ve got another job on Fridays that keeps me busy.”

“I know,” Benny said without thinking and then, unable to take it back, avoided looking at him by punching open a couple of soda cans. “I mean, Lulu said she saw you playing somewhere else.”

This got him a look over Abe’s shoulder, but it wasn’t sour. Just careful.

Benny squinted at the soda as he poured it, telling himself no one griped more over a stingy drink than a guy losing at poker. “What’s it like?”

“The Stork Club?” 

“No.”

Abe’s smile lifted a little higher on one side. “Trying to get some dirt on the competition?”

People generally didn’t try to tease a guy who looked like Benny. He wasn’t used to it, unsteady on his feet like he was standing at the top of the stairs with a cat twining around his ankles. 

“I’m just curious. Can’t a guy be curious?”

“No law against it.” Abe snagged one of the full glasses and took a sip. He seemed to let the drink linger in his mouth for a second, considering it, and then swallowed with a look on his face that said it actually wasn’t too bad. “You could always come by sometime and see for yourself.”

Benny suddenly forgot what he was doing with his hands. The noise in the joint seemed to skip like it was on the Edison, silent for an instant and then too loud. 

“I work in a gin mill already. What do I want to go to another one for?”

Abe nodded like it was a fair point. “So what do you get up to in your free time?” 

He hesitated.

“Can’t a guy be curious?” Abe asked.

Benny gave in and felt himself smile. “I don’t know. Working nights mixes you up. I go to the pictures a lot.”

“What's the last thing you saw?”

“That Mata Hari picture.” It was actually the second-last thing he had seen, but he figured it sounded classier than admitting he had watched the latest _Danger Island_ twice on Sunday. 

“Was it any good?”

“Greta Garbo. What’s not to like?”

Abe took another sip of his drink. “Ramon Novarro’s in that one, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“How was he?”

Benny shrugged. “He’s no Valentino.”

Unexpectedly, Abe laughed. “Who is?”

It was the first time he had ever heard him laugh. It was a quiet sound, barely anything more than breathing out too hard, but it made Benny feel ten feet tall for having pried it out of him. His attention stuck for a second on the way Abe's eyes had crinkled at the corners.

“I’ve got to get back to it," Abe said, levering himself out of his lean and nodding at the clock. "But hey, stop by some Friday if you’re curious. Tell them ‘Valentino’ at the door and they’ll let you in.”

Benny didn’t have time to answer before Abe was making his way back to the piano. He opened his mouth, but his tongue decided it was purely decorative, and he shut it again as Dot came over to collect the poker table’s drinks. She followed his gaze and gave the kind of snort that only a dame like her could pass off as ladylike.

“What?” he finally managed to ask.

She shook her head. “Weird guy, that’s all.”

Benny frowned. “Would’ve thought he was your type.”

He couldn’t say he was an expert on women, but it stood to reason that if Dot was willing to fool around with a mook like him, she would be all over a man like that.

“Oh, Benny. Honey.” She stared at him for a long moment, then picked up the tray and walked away.

* * *

The thing about big guys was that plenty of them were cowards.

If you looked tough enough, Benny had learned, you didn’t actually have to be tough. Sure, there was always going to be the occasional whacko who couldn’t stop himself from picking a fight with the biggest guy in the room, but for the most part, people were careful with you when you were Benny's size. They apologized when they scuffed your shoe. They never cut ahead of you in line. They kept their eyes off your girl and their opinions on your mother and sister to themselves. 

So maybe a big guy, being short on practice when it came to getting nervous, might mistake the feeling for indigestion and shrug it off as the result of a bad sandwich. Maybe he would figure, sure, what the hell, and go ahead and fake a case of the ‘flu to get a night off. Ask the doorman at the place he worked to fill in for him at the bar, and ask a buddy he used to drive with to fill in at the door. Convince his boss’s girl that he didn’t need her to come around with a bowl chicken soup. 

Maybe he would even pay for a hot shave and a shoeshine and ask his downstairs neighbor to iron his good shirt for him, putting it on while it was still warm and damp as she scolded him in Hungarian. Maybe he would take the trolley over to 7th Avenue and hop off near the theater where he had sometimes gone with his Ma and sisters as a kid, and turn down Barrow Street, thinking to himself that he looked pretty sharp when he caught sight of his reflection in a cafe window. Maybe he would find the unmarked doorway around back of a hotel, and maybe he would step right up and say the magic word, and maybe that door would swing on open and let him into fairyland.

And maybe it would turn out that he didn't have any more courage than that.

Benny never made it into the club proper that night. He got exactly as far as the set of open curtains that hung between the entryway and the ballroom, and there he halted, unable to take a single step further. Unaware in the moment of what had frozen his feet, he went back and forth on whether he should check his coat. He looked around at the decor, trying to remember what one of those long chairs was called and wondering what the curtains were made of. They were nice ones, heavy velvet or something like it, in dark purple with some kind of gold trim. Of course Lulu would have seen them when she was here with the boss, but he forgot all about that and told himself that this was why he had stopped short of going inside to find a seat. He was inspecting the curtains. They were exactly the kind of thing that Lulu would blow her wig over, and he had better pay attention to them in case she asked him questions the next time he saw her.

His palms started to sweat as he stared at the curtains. Everything else about the place existed on the distant shore of that dark purple sea. Guys and dames in tuxedos and gowns. A guy in a gown, a dame in a tux. Couples dancing. Guys and dames. Guys. Dames. The band on stage, the drums and double bass and the glossy black grand piano that flashed like a signal mirror in the sun.

“ _My doctor_ ,” the singer was crooning, “ _he’s got the biggest practice in town._ ”

Abe was in a tux too, his hair plastered down more sternly than usual. His hands danced over the keys, and his head bopped in time with the drums. 

“ _Rich and poor, black and white, ring his bell all day and night—some folks faint at just the sight of my doctor!_ ”

The music quieted on cue, the singer pausing as if a question had just occurred to him in the middle of the show. “Abe,” he asked, “ _You_ haven’t met my doctor, have you?”

Tinkling high notes slowed to a stop, and then silence held the ballroom rapt for the full count of three before Abe brought his fist to his mouth and coughed once, delicately.

The whole place went up in laughter, and the music came swinging in again as the singer dove back into the chorus.

Benny dimly realized he was breathing too fast. He wasn’t laughing. He understood that the joke was funny, but he also suddenly understood that it wasn’t. Nothing here was funny, except maybe him. This place was a scream, that was what Lulu had said. She and the boss had come here to laugh, but it was Benny who was the big joke. Twenty-two years old and he hadn’t figured it out until just this moment. Staring at a guy playing piano every night and not seeing it. Holding on to a goddamn curtain like his life depended on it as a couple of men foxtrotted past him—

—as the song hit the last chorus on on a hot lick

as the applause came in a tidal wave—

—as someone _whistled_

He turned around and strode out of the club, out into the stifling night and down the first back street he met. He didn't pay attention to where he was going, just kept walking fast, shouldering through the evening crowds past people who took one look at him and apologized for bumping into him. Faster, farther, following the sound of no sound at all until he rounded a corner and finally found himself a lone. Only then did he stop, leaning against a wall to catch his breath. He closed his eyes and thumped his head against the bricks.

The thing about big guys was that some of them were every bit as stupid as you thought they were.

* * *

Everything sounded wrong after that night, and Benny would have been willing to believe it was all in his head if Abe hadn’t heard it too. 

It was something about the high notes. Even though he had told himself he was going to keep his eyes on nothing but his work from here on out, he couldn't exactly close his ears. The piano sounded subtly off, and when his gaze swept the room for trouble, he couldn’t help but notice that Abe was skipping over top keys like hopscotch squares. One minute he would be playing normally and the next his hands would jump down an octave for a bar or two, giving familiar hot-stepping standards a lower, almost mournful tone.

After three days down in the bass, he caught Abe making a face as he hit a sour note near the end of “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” There was no helping it then. He held off the worry until just after closing and asked:

“Is it busted?”

The boss wouldn’t like the expense of replacing the old Stuyvesant one bit, but if it came down to it, Benny was willing to plead its case. He wasn’t sure he could go back to long nights of everyone around here having to listen to themselves. It would be bad for business. He could get the money taken out of his pay in installments. Hell, he would bust a window at Macy’s and drag that display model thirty blocks if he had to. 

“It just needs tuning,” Abe said, poking at that flat-sounding key. He looked at the clock and seemed to weigh things up. “How late does Floyd usually stay? I could run home, get my tools, take care of this tonight.”

“You know how to tune a piano?” 

The corner of Abe’s mouth tilted up. “I know better than to quit my day job.”

“Go get them,” Benny said. “I’ll talk to Floyd.”

The truth was, Benny felt somehow personally responsible for the piano letting them down, like he had somehow jinxed it. Maybe Lulu’s enthusiasm for fixing up the place was catching. Or maybe despite all the vigor he was putting into not thinking about Toulouse, someone kept cutting frames of it into whatever else was playing behind his eyes, and there was no looking at their battered old upright without picturing that shiny black grand gleaming under the stage lights.

“Walk the girls home,” he told Floyd. “No funny business. Dot will tell me if there is, and then we’ll both make you sorry.”

He didn’t mind staying late, he told himself. There was always something that needed more cleaning or counting that got left off at the end of one night and had to be picked up the next. Better him staying than Floyd, who was only going to sit up there reading dirty comics. He took care of the cash, made a list of what they were running low on behind the bar, and was sweeping up when Abe got back about twenty minutes later with a leather case in hand.

Who knew that the Stuyvesant opened up? Benny watched with curiosity out of the corner of his eye as Abe propped it open and set up shop in the piano’s guts. It turned out that tuning was more like doctoring a patient than repairing an engine. He had half expected that something would be obviously broken inside, but apparently you couldn’t tell what was wrong by eye. Instead, Abe fiddled around with something that looked like a socket wrench but wasn’t. His left hand ran up and down the keys while his right carefully twisted the little pegs inside the piano.

The process was interesting to watch, but something about it made Benny tense. It was the scales, he slowly realized. Abe would play them halfway, just up to the broken note, then leave them hanging while he tried to fix it. It was like having a song stuck in your head, some tune you heard someone whistling in a store, and you knew it would drive you crazy if you never figured out how it ended. Or maybe it was like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

_Do-re-mi-fa—_

_Do-re-mi-fa-so—_

_Do-re-mi-fa-so-la—_

He scratched the back of his neck, running hot and cold with the sharps and flats until finally Abe sat down properly on the bench with his head tilted attentively to one side and rippled out a river of notes with both hands.

“It’s sounding better,” Benny said.

“Getting there.” Abe tapped a high note a few times in a row, tweaked another peg, then tapped it again. “Any requests?”

He had glanced back over his shoulder as he said it. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, and his hair had finally gotten the better of his pomade and was making a late-night break for freedom. Benny swallowed hard, still feeling like he was waiting for some last note to land.

“I don’t know. Something you like.”

There was a moment's pause, and then Abe started playing. Benny immediately regretted ever thinking about taking the old Stuyvesant out back and getting a newer model. The music that poured out of her was warm and sweet, and he was sure no one would ever make a record player that could keep up with a medley like the one served up to him. He caught a slice of “Ain’t Misbehavin’" that slotted into the break of “Blue Skies” and then slid into “Sleepy Time Gal.” Abe stuck with the best part of "Someone to Watch Over Me" just long enough that Benny worried it would be the end, but then it somehow livened up into the chorus of “Yosel, Yosel,” which he hadn’t thought about since he was a kid, and then sighed into something classical that Benny couldn’t have named with a gun to his head.

It sounded nice, that last one. Like leaves falling in the park, or maybe rain running down a windowpane. Then it was over.

“I didn’t think you played old stuff,” Benny said quietly when the music had tapered off and Abe’s hands had gone still on top of the keys.

Abe laughed under his breath. “What, you think Mrs. Fine on Delancey Street taught Gershwin? She wouldn’t even teach Debussy, he was too modern for her. She’d be turning over in her grave if she could see me now.”

“You’re good,” Benny blurted out before he could stop himself, set off by the wild idea that anyone would disapprove of a performance like that. “Everything you play. Even the—you know. Everything. I saw you at Toulouse. You were great.”

There was no taking it back once he had said it. All he could do was set his jaw.

Abe was silent for a moment, and then his fingers started wandering on the keys again. “Yeah? I thought I saw you there. The top of your head, at least.”

He was working his way backwards, Benny realized, playing another few bars of that classical piece, then back to “Yosel, Yosel.”

_Oh Joseph, Joseph, won’t you make your mind up  
It’s time I knew just how I stand with you_

“I left before the show was over,” Benny admitted, although he stopped short of confiding just how long. He watched Abe's hands, trying to figure out how he was hopping backwards like that and still making it sound right. “Not because you were—I mean, you were great up there. Honest. It was just—I don't know. I wasn't expecting it to be so—you know.”

Abe shrugged and kept on playing. “It’s the same as here, really. Just in a different key.”

“I’m tone deaf.” Benny said it out of habit, accustomed to trying to convince the girls that no one wanted to hear him sing. 

“I don’t think so.” Abe paused to poke at a particular note, then seemed to decide it was all right. “Are you looking to learn?”

Something went wrong with his throat. There was suddenly a lump in it, one he could hardly swallow over. “What do you mean?”

Abe started back in on Gershwin. “You spend a lot of time watching me play. Maybe you’re just picking up pointers?”

He could have said yes. He could have said yes, and that would have been the end of it. The subject would be thrown in the river, weighed down with a few cinder blocks, never to come up again. He knew it. But he was still watching Abe play. Still looking at his hands and finally knowing why it was so hard to stop. He shook his head. “I don’t want to play the piano.”

“All right,” Abe said, unflappable as ever and gently pressing down a closing chord. “Any other requests?”

There was only one thing Benny could think to ask for. 

“Let me walk you home?”

A guy could maybe get used to being laughed at if it always sounded that happy. 

“What a gentleman. Yeah. Sure. Walk me home.”

The sky was that light gray you got on the cold edge of morning when they left the speako, and Benny figured the cooks would be turning up at the automat soon. He could hear the sounds of the city waking up around them, delivery trucks on the move, but the way to Abe’s apartment proved mostly deserted. Here on the residential blocks, most people were still sleeping, whether they would be getting up for work soon or had just fallen in the door.

It was going to be one of those nice sunrises, the kind that came in through fluffy clouds and started off all pink and dark blue. He could tell by the feeling in the air. All the same, he found he didn’t really want the sky to get any lighter. He didn’t even want to ask Abe's address in case it turned out they were already there. He wouldn’t have minded at all if they just kept on walking together, Abe taking long strides and Benny taking short ones. Not if it somehow meant that the night wouldn’t be over just yet.

But that wasn't how the real world worked. 

“This is mine,” Abe said eventually, slowing to a stop in front of a narrow four-story building tethered to its neighbor with washing lines. 

“Right,” Benny said and halted on the sidewalk, shoving his hands into his pockets. 

Abe looked around the empty street and then up at the building. Benny followed his gaze. The windows were dark, and all of them except the ones at the very top were shut for the night now that the worst of the summer heat was behind them. 

“What do you want, kid?”

‘Kid’ wasn’t fair. “Benny. Call me Benny.”

Abe's voice got softer, and maybe it was so no one would hear them, and maybe it wasn't. “All right. What do you want, Benny?”

Benny opened his mouth, about to say that he didn't know, but that wasn't true. A shiver knocked his teeth together, even though it wasn’t that cold out. It had come from inside him, like his bones were going to rattle right out of his skin with all the things he wanted to do. 

“I heard a story about you,” Abe said.

He frowned and had no better luck finding his words. 

“I heard,” Abe said, “that the last piano player who touched something he shouldn’t have got his hand broken.”

It must have been Millie who told him, he thought. Maybe Lulu, but probably Millie. She'd been new at the time and had thrown a fit about it.

“Are you going to break my hand?” Abe asked.

For a moment, Benny could still only stare at him. The thought of hurting Abe was so crazy that the question didn’t even make any sense. He shook his head and then shook it again even harder.

Abe took a step closer and reached out slowly. He straightened Benny’s collar, which had apparently been lying twisted for who knew how long. Then he drew Benny’s hand out of his pocket and held it.

“These big mitts of yours,” he said, running his thumb slowly back and forth over a scarred knuckle and setting off the percussion in Benny’s chest. “I’ve been thinking about them ever since I met you.”

With that, he led Benny inside and quietly up the stairs to where a cool, dark bedroom and a half-decent drink were waiting for them. What followed was in a new key, all right, but as Benny discovered over what was left of the night—and during a reprise after breakfast—it made for a hell of a duet.


End file.
